December, 2010

("I’m actually going to use these shorts to brew tea with this afternoon.")

If you’re like us, you sometimes stand while waiting for your coffee at Starbucks or or at the urinal of an all you can eat crab shack and ponder things like, "Why can’t CagePotato have a TV show" and "Whatever happened to Luke Cummo?"

Since PBS isn’t big on our brand of humor, the television thing likely won’t happen any time in the near future, but we can give you the 411 on Cummo.

Apparently the pre-Machida-era pee drinking fighter from TUF 2 retired without telling anyone and is planning on launching an organic fight clothing line.

"Yeah, [I retired]. I have a bum knee from when I was fifteen. Excess weight caused a bulge in the meniscus and the surgeon convinced my mom to get it cut out. That’s not an excuse," the 3-4 UFC veteran told MMASucka recently. "I feel unbelievably fortunate to have been in the cage and made it out. If I was a gladiator, I would still be alive to tell the tale… like before my last fight when the photographer took my picture right before walking out into the arena. The flash burned a circle into my vision and it didn’t go away for a while."

In case you’re wondering if the new age nutrition buff still enjoys things like coffee enemas and drinking his own piss, well as they say "old habits never change." Apparently though, they do evolve into something stranger and more disgusting.

In case you’ve been wondering, we haven’t abandoned the live, interactive editions of The Bum Rush, we’ve just been trying to figure out how to fix all of the audio issues we’ve encountered since we began using Talkshoe.

Since you’ve been asking about when we’re going to include the Potato Nation in another podcast, we figured we’d make our last episode of the year an interactive one so we can drink rum and eggnog and shoot the shit with our homies during the holidays.

You can listen to live, HERE at 5:30 pm ET tomorrow and then check back in on Thursday for bonus taped interviews added to the show with UFC lightweight George Sotiropoulos and Nemesis fighter Chris McNally.If you want to call in and participate in the show, follow these instructions:

Dial (724) 444-7444 Enter: 89629 # (Call ID) Enter: 1 # or your PIN if you have a Talkshoe account. We will be notified that you are in the queue to talk with us.

If the recent reports are accurate, Antonio Rogerio Nogueira will take on Tito Ortiz in a light-heavyweight feature at UFC 128 (March 19th, Newark). Lil’ Nog will be looking to bounce back after Ryan Bader handed him his first loss in three-and-a-half years at UFC 119. Meanwhile, Ortiz hasn’t tasted victory in over four years. (Seriously. We can’t believe he’s still around either.) Despite the career tailspin of the HBBB, Nogueira isn’t taking him lightly. As he tells our Brazilian correspondent Brian D’Souza:

"I think he’s a very tough guy. He’s an ex-champion, he [was] undefeated for many years. I think he’s a very good wrestler…he has very good Muay Thai. I think he’s dangerous, but I’m gonna do my best for sure. I want to make a better fight from last time. I’ve had two or three fights with wrestling guys, I think I’ve proven my wrestling…I want to do a very good fight with Tito. I can do better."

Nogueira also discusses his new gym in San Diego, and his training partner Anderson Silva’s upcoming bout with Vitor Belfort. It will not surprise you to discover that Lil’ Nog has his money on the Spider.

I never thought I’d ever speak out against a grand prix tournament, but because the proposed Strikeforce heavyweight tournament has so many question marks surrounding it, I’m almost hoping it doesn’t happen.

When Scott Coker mentioned earlier this year that Strikeforce was either going to piss or get off the pot when teasing its fans with heavyweight fights that never seem to come to fruition because of those crazy Russians for whatever reason, I thought he meant it.

What Sco-Co should have said was, "We’ll likely milk the current roster for whatever we can and if we can make the fights fans want to see, then we will, but we likely won’t."

According to Tatame, the California-based promotion is planning on stretching the tournament over three events and will likely anchor Strikeforce’s foray into pay-per-view TV — a move necessitated by the fact that it’s unlikely that CBS will be having them back on network TV in 2011 and the costs of greasing the pockets of M-1 Global for each Fedor-featured event are likely more than most Russians make in their lives.

We hate to say we told you so (no we don’t) but Brad Pickett’s undercard bout with Ivan Menjivar at WEC 53 turned out to be a pretty good scrap. According to people who were on the scene in Glendale on Thursday night, the unaired prelims for this event were pretty epic. Maybe that’s what induced the live crowd to boo every takedown and cheer every Jesus reference during the televised portion of the card. Or maybe Arizona just sucks, who knows. We’re still waiting for the emergence of video evidence of the slam Eddie Wineland laid on Ken Stone – which briefly caused rumors to circulate through the arena that Stone had a broken neck. (He didn’t. He was fine.) – but for now we’ll have to make do with this pleasing little three-rounder. Spoilers (if you can call them that four days after the event) are after the jump.

("I’ve been doing this too long to take things for granted. I’ve seen it happen too often where a guy loses and then comes back and wins." Photo courtesy of UFC.com)

By CagePotato.com contributor Elias Cepeda

There’s a fun game you can play with undefeated UFC lightweight Gray Maynard: Ask him to name, let alone talk about, someone he’s beaten. He can’t do it.

It should be easy for the #1 title contender — he’s had just eleven fights in his four-and-a-half year MMA career, and hasn’t lost a single one. He has many more wins to choose from if you include his entire amateur wrestling career that dates back to his childhood.

Still, as he sits during some downtime between training on the Saturday exactly two weeks before he will face UFC lightweight champion Frankie Edgar at UFC 125 in Las Vegas, Maynard’s brain freezes when asked about his wins. Gray isn’t difficult to speak with, and his mind is sound. It just works a bit differently than most of ours.

Ask Maynard who he’s lost to and he can rattle ten names off in a row. “People say, ‘oh, you’ve never lost.’ Sure I have. I’ve been in combat sports since I was a kid and have lost lots of times from when I was three all the way through college.”

Gray seems to remember every time he’s come up short on the mats — recalling even grade-school losses with gritted teeth. “They still irk me today,” he says.

Aleksander Emelianenko was back in action Saturday night in Khabarovsk, Russia, where he faced Australian K-1/Sengoku vet Peter Graham in the main event of Draka: Governor’s Cup 2010. Despite Graham’s decorated kickboxing background, he came into the fight with an underwhelming MMA record of 3-5, with notable losses to Kazuyuki Fujita, Rolles Gracie, and Jim York (all by first-round choke).

But this was no ordinary MMA match — special rules were in place so that fighters would be stood up after just 30 seconds. Not that it would matter to Aleks, who hasn’t needed much more than his fists lately. In fact, The Other Emelianenko had finished all of his previous eight opponents in the first round. True, most of those opponents were no-name punching bags who looked like they didn’t belong in the ring with him, and his April win against Eddy Bengtsson was one of the dive-iest dives in diving history. Would Graham be another conquest on Alek’s can-crushing streak? As the headline of this post should have already informed you, no, not at all.

The Junkie also notes that a couple months back M-1 boss Vadim Finkelstein said the rent-a-Fedor outfit was “negotiating primarily with Showtime to secure Emelianenko’s return.” Not to read too much into that, but it pretty much makes it sound like Strikeforce itself is the least important party in these talks. It also indicates that maybe Kogan wasn’t just blowing smoke recently when he said M-1 was trying leverage its own live fight events onto Showtime. If they can pull that off, well, I wonder if they could also speak to my mortgage lender.